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livShavuot was lovely, apart from one annoying thing I posted about in a locked entry.
I didn't stay up all night studying this year, but I went to a very good Tikkun Leyl Shavuot organized by my community, even if it ended at 11 pm rather than dawn. I learned about a Ketubah style poem used by Sephardi communities on Shavuot; themes of home and returning in Ruth; a very long acrostic which spells out "I am Meir b Eliezer of Norwich in England" (and some other pieties, but the reference to a local location is the fun part); a bunch of Yiddish curses and a song; some cool as always stuff fromhatam_soferet about the middle words in the Torah and how they're decorated. The highlight was a young grad student who spoke about the mutual influence of Egyptology and Jewish studies, including pointing out that many of the words in Tanach are borrowed from Egyptian, especially the words for measurement, but also the word אנכי , the variant of the first person pronoun which opens the Ten Commandments.
Fridayghoti_mhic_uait drove us to Yorkshire so I could run services with a small community there. That meant we got to bring 2yo G, and go via Skegness to eat chips on the beach, and generally it was lovely. We had a slightly awkward liturgical situation, because the community had asked me to run it as if it were second day Shavuot, but Reform prayerbooks aren't really set up for second day festivals, so I had to kind of improvise to make it both Shabbat and festival. The community had come up with the brilliant innovation of arranging for an icecream van to visit the synagogue after the service. After all the driving and service leading we were out of energy for anything beyond collapsing with a Macdonalds takeaway in our hotel room, but it was nice to eat lowest-common-denominator fast food with lovely people.
Morning service similar: I read part of Naso, the Torah portion that would have been correct for that Shabbat if we were counting it as not Shavuot, and Exodus 19-20 describing the giving of Torah for the festival. A congregant read Ruth 1 which isn't totally the correct Haftarah but everybody likes it better than the official one. And I gave more or less the standard Shavuot sermon about how there was an element of coercion at Sinai, partly because God is infinitely powerful so how can humans consensually form a Covenant or treaty with the Divine, partly because the experience of being at Sinai was incredibly terrifying, and partly because of the amazing midrash from Bavli Shabbat about God holding the mountain suspended over our heads and threatening to bury us if we didn't accept the Torah. Then I kind of put a little poly twist on it by drawing an analogy with the potential power imbalance in the relationships in Ruth: Naomi is twice Ruth's age but Boaz can give the young foreign widow protection, and equally Boaz is rich, male and influential, but Naomi and Ruth can outnumber him. Similarly, the Torah is not only the document of our Covenant with God, but can be seen as a party to the relationship with the ability to protect us so that we're no longer infinitely unequal with God. So that was fun, and I think went over well.
The lovely community fed us lunch including home-made cheesecake, and cooed over G being adorable, and were totally chill about me turning up with a different partner from the previous time I visited. And then I gave a shiur about how the Rabbis read back the rituals of conversion into Torah. This is partly based on material I learned from R' Ethan Tucker but I have a chiddush about Ezekiel 16 being the unexpected missing link.
And we drove back slowly and gently in the sunshine, stopping off at Herbie's Diner a little outside Cambridge to sample weird American fizzy drinks like grape Fanta (made entirely of PURPLE) and exotic flavours of Mountain Dew and such. Good milkshakes, mediocre IMO wraps and fries, but generally a nice outing.
Then after the festival we had a long weekend for the Christian version of Pentecost. So I spent Sunday going on a little wander withjack and generally recuperating, and Monday hanging out with hatam_soferet and family in a nice playpark by the river. 5yo L has invented a very relaxing-for-adults form of pretend play, where we start out some boring scenario of café or school or camping, but she often gets interrupted by urgent phonecalls requiring her to run off and rescue animals from some dire peril, thus leaving plenty of time for the adults to chat during her rescue missions, while still feeling like we're part of the scenario. L was wearing a crown and cape from her Shavuot party, and I think convinced a nearby 2yo she was actual royalty.
And then I made treacle tart out of some leftover bought pastry and the tail end of the baguette from the picnic, so that was just about a perfect weekend.
I didn't stay up all night studying this year, but I went to a very good Tikkun Leyl Shavuot organized by my community, even if it ended at 11 pm rather than dawn. I learned about a Ketubah style poem used by Sephardi communities on Shavuot; themes of home and returning in Ruth; a very long acrostic which spells out "I am Meir b Eliezer of Norwich in England" (and some other pieties, but the reference to a local location is the fun part); a bunch of Yiddish curses and a song; some cool as always stuff from
hatam_soferet about the middle words in the Torah and how they're decorated. The highlight was a young grad student who spoke about the mutual influence of Egyptology and Jewish studies, including pointing out that many of the words in Tanach are borrowed from Egyptian, especially the words for measurement, but also the word אנכי , the variant of the first person pronoun which opens the Ten Commandments.Friday
ghoti_mhic_uait drove us to Yorkshire so I could run services with a small community there. That meant we got to bring 2yo G, and go via Skegness to eat chips on the beach, and generally it was lovely. We had a slightly awkward liturgical situation, because the community had asked me to run it as if it were second day Shavuot, but Reform prayerbooks aren't really set up for second day festivals, so I had to kind of improvise to make it both Shabbat and festival. The community had come up with the brilliant innovation of arranging for an icecream van to visit the synagogue after the service. After all the driving and service leading we were out of energy for anything beyond collapsing with a Macdonalds takeaway in our hotel room, but it was nice to eat lowest-common-denominator fast food with lovely people. Morning service similar: I read part of Naso, the Torah portion that would have been correct for that Shabbat if we were counting it as not Shavuot, and Exodus 19-20 describing the giving of Torah for the festival. A congregant read Ruth 1 which isn't totally the correct Haftarah but everybody likes it better than the official one. And I gave more or less the standard Shavuot sermon about how there was an element of coercion at Sinai, partly because God is infinitely powerful so how can humans consensually form a Covenant or treaty with the Divine, partly because the experience of being at Sinai was incredibly terrifying, and partly because of the amazing midrash from Bavli Shabbat about God holding the mountain suspended over our heads and threatening to bury us if we didn't accept the Torah. Then I kind of put a little poly twist on it by drawing an analogy with the potential power imbalance in the relationships in Ruth: Naomi is twice Ruth's age but Boaz can give the young foreign widow protection, and equally Boaz is rich, male and influential, but Naomi and Ruth can outnumber him. Similarly, the Torah is not only the document of our Covenant with God, but can be seen as a party to the relationship with the ability to protect us so that we're no longer infinitely unequal with God. So that was fun, and I think went over well.
The lovely community fed us lunch including home-made cheesecake, and cooed over G being adorable, and were totally chill about me turning up with a different partner from the previous time I visited. And then I gave a shiur about how the Rabbis read back the rituals of conversion into Torah. This is partly based on material I learned from R' Ethan Tucker but I have a chiddush about Ezekiel 16 being the unexpected missing link.
And we drove back slowly and gently in the sunshine, stopping off at Herbie's Diner a little outside Cambridge to sample weird American fizzy drinks like grape Fanta (made entirely of PURPLE) and exotic flavours of Mountain Dew and such. Good milkshakes, mediocre IMO wraps and fries, but generally a nice outing.
Then after the festival we had a long weekend for the Christian version of Pentecost. So I spent Sunday going on a little wander with
jack and generally recuperating, and Monday hanging out with hatam_soferet and family in a nice playpark by the river. 5yo L has invented a very relaxing-for-adults form of pretend play, where we start out some boring scenario of café or school or camping, but she often gets interrupted by urgent phonecalls requiring her to run off and rescue animals from some dire peril, thus leaving plenty of time for the adults to chat during her rescue missions, while still feeling like we're part of the scenario. L was wearing a crown and cape from her Shavuot party, and I think convinced a nearby 2yo she was actual royalty.And then I made treacle tart out of some leftover bought pastry and the tail end of the baguette from the picnic, so that was just about a perfect weekend.
